Debra Gwartney, author of Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, has a valuable blog post up this week looking at “A Few Memoir Pitfalls.”  Good reading to remind ourselves, and particularly useful for those of us who teach:

Here’s an excerpt.  The full essay can be found here:

…The most skilled and engaging memoirists, to my way of reading, don’t dwell quite so much on what happened, but instead on the question that I feel is at the heart of memoir: why do I remember a particular episode (series of episodes) that way? Again, how is my version of the event (not the event itself) serving me and my sense of self?

…

What the reader doesn’t want, and can’t invest in, is a self-pitying narrator. The those bad people did this to good me mode of writing memoir gets tiresome in…